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FLESH
West Beneath The Clipperton Fracture Zone
The Aztecs said that . . . as long as one of them was left he would die fighting, and that we would get nothing of theirs because they would burn everything or throw it into the water.
-- Hernán Cortés, Third Dispatch to King Charles V of Spain
On September 5, they found their first hadals. Reaching a fossilized shore, they unloaded their rafts and hauled gear to high ground and started to prepare for night. Then one of the soldiers noticed shapes within the opaque folds of flowstone.
By shining their lights at a certain angle, they could see a virtual Pompeii of bodies laminated in several inches to several feet of translucent plastic stone. They lay in the positions they had died in, some curled, most sprawled. The scientists and soldiers fanned out across the acres of amber, slipping now and then on the slick face.
Pieces of flint still jutted from wounds. Some had been strangled with their own entrails or decapitated. Animals had worked through all of them. Limbs were missing, chest and belly walls had been plundered. No question, this had been the end of a whole tribe or township.
Under Ali's sweeping headlamp, their white skin glittered like quartz crystal. For all the heavy bone in their brows and cheeks, and despite the obvious violence of their end, they were remarkably delicate.
H. hadalis -- this variety, at any rate -- looked faintly apelike, but with very little body hair. They had wide negroid noses and full lips, somewhat like Australian aborigines, but were bleached albino by the perpetual night. There were a few slight beards, little more than wispy goatees. Most looked no older than thirty. Many were children.
The bodies were scarred in ways that had nothing to do with sports or surgery: no appendectomy scars in this group, no neat smile lines around the knees or shoulders. These had come from camp accidents or hunts or war. Broken bones had healed crookedly. Fingers had been lopped off. The women's breasts hung slack, thinned and stretched and unbeautiful, basic tools like their sharpened fingernails and teeth or their wide flattened feet or their splayed big toes for climbing.
Ali tried integrating them into the family of modern man. It did not help that they had horns and calcium folds and lumps distorting their skulls. She felt strangely bigoted. Their mutations or disease or evolutionary twist -- whatever -- kept her at arm's length. She was sorry to be walking on them, yet glad to have them safely encased in stone. Whatever had been done to them, she imagined they would have been capable of doing to her.
That night they discussed the bodies lying beneath their camp.
It was Ethan Troy who solved their mystery. He had managed to chip loose portions of the bodies, mostly of children, and held them out for the rest to see. "Their tooth enamel hasn't grown properly. It's been disrupted. And all the kids have rickets and other long-limb malformations. And you only have to look to see their swollen stomachs. Massive starvation. Famine. I saw this once in a refugee camp in Ethiopia. You never forget."
"You're suggesting these are refugees?" someone asked. "Refugees from who?"
"Us," said Troy.
"You're saying man killed them?"
"At least indirectly. Their food chain was ruptured. They were fleeing. From us."
Excerpted from The Descent by Jeff Long. Copyright © 1999 by Jeff Long. Excerpted by permission of Crown, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Copyright © 1999, Random House, Inc.